CHERNOBYL SHAKES REINDEER CULTURE OF LAPPS

By FRANCIS X. CLINES, Special to the New York Times

Published: September 14, 1986

GLEN, Sweden—
In fright and confusion, the Lapp people have begun herding their radiation-laden reindeer down from the mountain feeding grounds to face one of the grimmest challenges yet to their ancient culture.

''It's so terrible because you can't see it, you can't smell it - it's just there,'' Olof Johannson said of the cloud-borne radiation spawned from the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union five months ago.

The cloud's harvest is proving alarming to the Laplanders, for 97 percent of the first 1,000 reindeer put to the annual fall slaughter this week have been measured in excess of permissible radiation levels and declared unfit for human consumption. Mr. Johansson has been devastated not for economic reasons but for his hope to carry forward a way of life tied for millennia to the wonderfully durable reindeer.

As the herders corralled the gracefully antlered deer, they expressed gratitude for a last-minute reprieve from an emergency plan that would have seen the instant slaughter and deep burial this month of tens of thousands of reindeer considered heavily contaminated. Fed to Mink and Fox

Instead, the Swedish Government is trying an odd bit of symbiosis to protect the Lapps by buying and feeding contaminated deer meat to the region's mink and fox farms. Those creatures are not part of the human food chain, and the expensive coats made from their fur will not be affected, according to the Government.

''The calfing season was great, the new deer look beautiful,'' Mr. Johansson said. And indeed the animals seemed triumphant with their thick fur glowing dark as mahogony and their antlers tiaralike.

But a considerable number had fattened themselves this summer on vegetation watered by the nuclear rains that fell in the central third of the herding lands that stretch across a vast northern arc of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

This ascetically beautiful terrain has always been called Lapland, the land of the indigenous Same people. This is the name some Lapps prefer amid the modern surge of cultural identity that they now consider threatened because of the reindeer contamination.

As the local herders took a break from their first post-cloud roundup, an event that will measure the precise damage to the herds, they squatted and eyed the hard, weather-beaten land like tired cowboys. Paul Doj casually consumed a slice of his pungent lunch of dried reindeer meat. ''Ten thousand bequerals!'' a companion cried out, pointing and leaping up as he laughingly shouted a mock death warning in the radiation terminology of science that is now sadly familiar to the Sames.

The initial readings have proved so depressing, with upper limits more than 10 times the permissible level, that some experts are calling it a catastrophe, while others are questioning whether the Swedish limit is too stringent and unrealistic. It is 300 bequerals per kilogram of meat, while most of the rest of Europe has an easier limit of 600, and the United States sets 1,500, according to Swedish scientists.

The confusion has only sharpened the Sames' anxiety about the future of their herds and the future of their own children who feed off the herds. #2,000 Years of History After 2,000 years of prevailing alongside the reindeer against some of nature's harshest challenges, the Sames are gravely wondering whether they can once more adapt to the shifting circumstances of life. They long ago mastered the northern snow, for which their language has 80 different words for its subtleties.

And they will traverse the new land of radiation if history be the guide, for Tacitus first wrote of them in 98 A.D., admiring their strength as nomadic hunters and fishermen.

Sames say the new threat comes as a blow to their pride, for they are seeing all their careful herding effort produce contaminated meat that must be dyed blue to discourage human consumption. In recent years, the Sames, well adapted to modern life, had developed cooperatives to build a lucrative gourmet food export business.

This will continue to some degree, but sale of the contaminated meat will have to prop up the reindeer economy and culture through an indefinite future of being scrutinized for radiation effects, both deer and herders.

''Who would have thought nature could be so wounded in such a remote place?'' asked Mr. Doj, a Same journalist who discovered in the mountain roundup that his own herd was too contaminated for human consumption. #50 Percent Above Limit ''I am sick,'' he said, planning to journey to buy additional meat in one of the cleaner regions and vowing to take extra aim in the annual elk hunt now starting. Unfortunately, 50 percent of the first elk slain have registered above the 300 limit, according to Prof. Hans Svensson of the University of Umea, one of those who think the radiation standards may be unrealistic.

Upland deer owners in contaminated areas have been cautioned against consuming too much local fish and berries, as well as the deer meat that is the main daily protein food for many of them.